Month: March 2017

“And the Road Goes On Forever”

~ Elizabeth ~ 1 Comment

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The less said about the last two days of driving across the country, the better. Suffice it to say that there was a great deal of traffic on the interstates once we got past Chicago. The dogs no longer had the freedom to romp across vast empty fields. So they began to get cabin fever. More traffic meant meaning to have to pay closer attention to angry drivers which meant we were getting grumpier. McDonald’s consistent food tasted the same,which is their point, but it got very very tiring to eat it.

I was so elated when we came to this sign that I pulled the van into the Welcome Center and ran in and said, “Welcome us. We just arrived from Oregon.” We got our first taste of New England reserve when neither clerk responded. Then my husband, from Alabama, saw the road was now called “The Yankee Highway.” We decided not to take a photo of that to send to his mother! My husband had actually been taught in the 1960’s that the Civil War was the “war of Northern aggression.” He didn’t believe it then or now, but the sign did spark a lively conversation about our different high school history classes.

We finally arrived at a local motel where we stayed before we signed the final papers to purchase the house. We couldn’t understand why the wife was so unhappy to be selling us their home.( I will write about that soon.) We got the keys, drove over to our new home, entered and learned that the movers were delayed for another three days. We had no furniture, save one lawn chair. We did have blankets, drove straight to Sleepy’s Mattress, pleaded our case, and had a new bed by that evening.

It may have been unfurnished, but the heat worked, we had appliances, and I cooked us real food–the first in over a week.

The dogs ran around the back yard, reluctant to ever enter the van again. We had made it across the country in the dead of winter and we were still speaking! Thank G.O.D.!

“Why Dixon, Illinois?”

~ Elizabeth ~ 2 Comments

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I know that we went to Dixon, Illinois and saw this house, the boyhood home of former President Reagan. But looking at a map today, I have no idea why. Neither of us had any great love of Reagan, and it looks as if we got off the right highway and onto Interstate 88. That might explain why when I try to remember this day all that returns is a general sense of grumpiness.

My husband and I love each other. We both loved both of our dogs. However, we were getting really really tired of each others’company. Tired of motels. Tired of Egg McMuffins, and we hadn’t even reached Eastern Standard Time. The phrase “Great Plains” should have been called “the never ending story.” We could well imagine earlier people thinking they went on forever. So it looks as if we missed a turn and got on Interstate 88.

I am not sure seeing Reagan’s house made lemonade out of lemons. But it was dusk, and we saw it and then found a motel and then went to eat at a tacky restaurant and called it a day. Only Ohio, Pennsylvania and a bit of New York stood between us and Connecticut. How bad could it be?

“Could You Resist a Danish Windmill?”

~ Elizabeth ~ 3 Comments

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We had been on Interstate 80 after Interstate 84 divided in Wyoming. 80 goes all across a very very very flat part of the United States. As in no hills, not even slight inclines. So when were through Nebraska(and only Nebraskans know how wide Nebraska is!) we entered Iowa and saw a sign advertising a Danish windmill. As in a not flat structure that wasn’t a grain elevator. Such an anomalous site certainly deserved our visit, so we got off the freeway and went to Elkhorn, Iowa.

It was a very quirky place serving a Danish smörgåsbord for lunch. I didn’t realize that there was a Danish cuisine, and I’m not sure that a windmill in Iowa is the ideal location for encountering it for the first time. I remember pickled beets. Beyond that, nothing sticks in my memory.

They were very friendly which made up for the less than stellar food. The gift shop was all items imported from Denmark, and I bought a lovely tile to put hot dishes on at the table. It said (in Danish)danishtile

When I was using my handy Google Translate tool as I wrote this, I discovered that it is in Norwegian. But it turns out that the two languages are very similar. In case you don’t use it, Google Translate is free and is indispensable when reading blogs from around the world. Although the translations are very literal, and don’t work very well for poetry, they do allow me to read writers I would otherwise pass over.

As Google tells me “For dit helbred”, (to your health in Danish.)

“When In Nebraska”

~ Elizabeth ~ 2 Comments

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We spent a long long time in Nebraska, and we became aware that the major activities in Nebraska were raising corn and raising beef. We hadn’t spent much time or money eating dinners on our trip, usually just picking up something quick. But here we were in Kearney, Nebraska, so we decided to have a steak.

We pulled off the interstate and were immediately attracted to a classic looking steakhouse called Amber Rose. Sure enough, it was the real deal, with a dark interior and tin ceiling. We had been freezing all day and were ready for a hot Midwestern dinner: steak and potatoes. We don’t eat that way often, and when we climbed into the Kearney Best Western Motel that night, our food coma reminded us why we don’t.

In fact, we stayed full through the morning. I even passed on my daily Egg McMuffin in favor of just coffee. Then it was on to Iowa.

 

Traveling East in Winter

~ Elizabeth ~ 10 Comments

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Most people don’t try to drive across the country in February, but that was when we had to travel and take the dogs. Between Oregon and Connecticut in the winter, snow is inevitable. In fact, our moving company decided to go south through Texas to avoid weather delays.

We tried to go about 550 miles a day. As providence, or luck,or fate(pick your philosophical choice) would have it, there was a series of storms just ahead of us and just behind us. As long as we kept up our pace, we could completely avoid the snow storms. We would come on the Interstate hours after the gates(such as pictured above)had been reopened to traffic. The next day, they would be dropped again closing the highway. The most snow we ever encountered was in Wyoming as powder blew across the road from nearby fields.

There was abundant snow everywhere we traveled, but it wasn’t snowing on the days we were actually driving. The dogs loved the snow and ran, jumped and spun in it each chance they got. It was, however, freezing. Literally. We had a zippered car top carrier to hold our suitcases, and my husband emptied it each evening to bring things into the hotel. One frigid Wyoming morning, as the dogs merrily chased rabbits across the adjacent snowy fields, my husband nearly gave up trying to repack the carrier. Finally, the zipper closed and we set out again.

The movers got stuck in the snow on their southern route and were delayed for three days.

“Home Sweet Home? Not”

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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Remember that we were traveling with two rambunctious dogs from Oregon to Connecticut in a minivan. I hope you are now feeling the situation! We needed to stay in motels where they allowed dogs. Fortunately, we had a book of dog friendly places to stay, and fortunately it was February, not a prime vacation time. We would drive several hundred miles, anticipate when we would need to spend the night, and call one of these places to reserve a room.

The rooms were always clean and always located very near a door to the outside. They were fine for our purposes. For the dogs, they were heaven. They sniffed contentedly around these rooms, conversing in their noses with all the previous canine guests. It took them a while to settle down after each new immersion experience.

We left each morning at around 5:30, before the sun rose, and made it a habit to stop at McDonald’s after a while for coffee and Egg Mcmuffins. I will always associate that sandwich with our trip, and have only ever had a couple since then.

The nicest aspects of the trip for the dogs were the rest areas. In the summer, dogs need to be contained in a pet area and stay on leashes. In February we were usually the only car in the rest stop, and the dogs raced around unleashed and gleeful. The occasional truck drivers had no problem with our dogs running free.

Throughout most of our trip we mainly saw trucks on Interstate 84, the route we took most of the way. Most encouragingly, we kept seeing large trucks with G.O.D. signs on their sides. Apparently this stood for Guaranteed Overnight Delivery, but we felt it was affirming our trek.

February weather? More tomorrow.

“Eastward Ho The Minivan”

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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In late middle age, you can continue on in your usual rooted patterns–tenured faculty position, solid civil service job, kids launched, and routine established. Or, you can lay it all down and move 3000 miles away to restart your life. We felt very strongly that this was God’s intention for our lives. That will seem odd to many, but it felt true for us. Our daughter lived in New York City, so that was a logical reason to relocate, for those who needed logic.

We left Portland, in February 2001, just as scores of new people began flooding into Oregon, the new hip place to be. We went to Connecticut, just as people were leaving Connecticut for the lure of Oregon. Nearly everyone we met had an adult child who had left for Portland or Seattle.

My husband had a job offer in Hartford, and I could teach in the local community college. We worked with a real estate buyer’s agent long distance to find a house. We wanted to live in a racially diverse neighborhood, with sidewalks, walking distance to a grocery store. We flew out one weekend in the fall and bought the lovely colonial revival house pictured above. It was bigger than our old home, had a larger yard, and cost less than the one we had sold. A great start. It also looked exactly like my childhood doll house!

But we were moving in February and we had two Australian Shepherds. Airlines won’t fly dogs in the dead of winter, so we needed to drive ourselves across the country. It was a very good thing that we had purchased that minivan the previous spring. So on February 14, Oregon’s birthday, we loaded ourselves and our dogs into the Dodge and left for the East.

More tomorrow.

“A Minivan? Really?”

~ Elizabeth ~ 2 Comments

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Maybe it was my nostalgia for the way back of my childhood station wagon. Maybe it was a loathing, completely irrational, for SUVs. At any rate, when my clutch knee gave out, we rented a minivan while we looked for a car with an automatic transmission. And, “dear reader, I married him.”(Literary allusion for the literary types.)

So one afternoon in April, I wandered over to Timberline Dodge to “look at” minivans. And of course they just happened to have an excellent deal on a green/blue minivan that just happened to be in the showroom that very day. And for a “very reasonable” monthly payment, I could own it. We had never bought a car on payments, and of course I had loudly bragged about that fact. But I called my husband at work to come over and “check out” this van and hear about the “very reasonable” payments.

He could tell I was smitten, and we left that day in a brand new 2000 Dodge Caravan with three rows of seats, a great stereo and automatic transmission. Best of all, I could see out all directions when I drove, no longer hunkered down in a regular car. I am only 5’4″ and had trouble seeing clearly out of our littler cars.

Now all we needed was a long distance trip to take it through its paces. Which we embarked on the next February. About which more tomorrow.

“Clutch???”

~ Elizabeth ~ 1 Comment

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My beloved Ford Fairlane, having traveled back and forth across the entire United States, met an untimely death. I had lent it to a “friend” who drove it headlong into another car on a quiet city street, demolishing my car. My “friend” was so “under the influence”(of what I dare not guess) that he just sat there until the police came to wake him up. So I lost a car and a “friend” in one afternoon.

Some time later, I bought a 1970 Toyota Corolla, similar to the one above, to replace my Ford. I know. I said I would always stick with Fords. But this was 1970, and anyone who was anyone on the West Coast now drove Japanese cars. And I wanted to be anyone, so I bought one. Somewhat clueless buyer that I was, it wasn’t until the car was driven to my house that I discovered it had manual transmission. And I had never driven a stick shift in my life. But—how hard could it be?

Well neigh impossible, it turns out. But my little sister came to the rescue. She drove the car over to a big empty parking lot. “We aren’t leaving here until you know how to shift gears!” So I ground the gears and stalled the car and ground some more and backed up by mistake. Finally I thought I was the queen of shifting. Then she said, “The real problem is on hills.” So she took me to a very slight incline and told me to imagine that she was lying behind the car. Then she told me to drive up the incline. I guess the fear of running her over(even just in my imagination) really worked. I learned exactly how to coordinate the clutch, brake and accelerator to go up a hill without rolling backwards.

And until 1996, when I developed severe bursitis in my clutching knee, I drove Japanese cars with stick shifts. And boy did I think I had it going on! But as we know, pride goeth before a fall.

My next car was a minivan.

“Just Stick Out Your Thumb”

~ Elizabeth ~ 9 Comments

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In the spring of 1967, I took another road trip.This one didn’t involve one car, but many. My boyfriend at the time(who later married my roommate, but that’s another story!) and I decided to go from Cambridge to Montreal to visit the World’s Fair. Neither of us had a car, but that didn’t seem to matter. We decided we would hitchhike.

At this time, the fastest way to get to Montreal would have been on the New York Thruway for most of the way. However, New York State was vigorously enforcing anti-hitchhiking laws. That left us Vermont. We caught our first ride across Massachusetts to Route 7 in Vermont and were determined to hitch up it to Canada. We were beyond ignorant of what we were planning. In those years, drivers on Route 7 were 1. few and far between and 2. not ever going more than 5 or 10 miles. We spent a day hopping through Vermont in very short spurts.

My favorite ride came courtesy of a family who passed us by and then circled back around to let us in the car. My boyfriend had long scraggly hair and I had straight long hair. The family said,”We never met any real hippies before, so we were curious.” They drove us 10 miles before letting us out.

Our last hitch was with a man in a Cadillac who stopped for us near the Canadian border. He was wearing a crash helmet, which ought to have been a warning, but we needed a ride. He could take us to the outskirts of Montreal. He drove like a maniac, and of course got pulled over by the Canadian border patrol who thoroughly searched his car for contraband. Fortunately for us clueless students, we were all waved through. It turned out he was well known by the guards!

We had a wonderful time at the Fair, staying with relatives.

We took Greyhound home.